With less than a week to go until the deadline to register to vote in Florida, a handful of activist groups announced that they signed up nearly 50,000 new voters, which they said almost makes up for an earlier deficit in registrations. They said the deficit occurred because of a provision in the elections reform bill passed last year that prompted some third-party groups to stop registering new voters for most of 2012.
Gihan Perera is with the group Florida New Majority. He cited a New York Times story from March that claimed new voter registrations were down by more than 81,000 people, with a provision of HR 1355 being the culprit. He said in May the deficit was still 64,000.
He said since then his organization and other groups have made "huge inroads," and will have close to 50,000 new registered voters by next Tuesday's deadline.
The provision of the elections bill that scared off groups like the League of Women Voters was a financial penalty for not returning the voter registration forms within 48 hours, opposed to two weeks.
The law was passed by the Republican-led Legislature in 2011, but it's been a third-party group — Strategic Allied Consulting, which is getting paid by the Republican Party of Florida to acquire new registrations — that has been making headlines the past week with reports of its employees turning in faulty registrations.
This article appears in Oct 4-10, 2012.